Amid refusal by 33 IAS Haryana officers for sharing their property details under the RTI Act and 36 other bureaucrats’ consent to give the information, the State Information Commission will hear the case on June 26, resuming the hearing after six years. According to RTI activist P P Kapoor, the previous hearing in the commission had taken place in February 2012 but “it was adjourned for indefinite period giving reference of a similar case pending before the Punjab and Haryana High Court”. Now, the Commission has informed Kapoor it has re-constituted the division bench comprising Yoginder Paul Gupta and Hemant Atri, both State Information Commissioners. Kapoor had approached the office of Haryana chief secretary on December 16, 2009, seeking information regarding property returns of all IAS officers, which they had given at the time of their appointments and they filed for the year 2008-09. According to Kapoor, the government had not provided the property details of the bureaucrats despite majority of them giving their consent for the same. According to Kapoor, as many as 33 IAS officers including A Mona Sreenivas, Abhilaksh Likhi, Dheera Khandelwal, RS Gujral (now retired) and Krishna Mohan (now retired) had expressed their unwillingness to disclose their annual property returns. However, IAS officers like PK Das, V Umashankar, Ashok Khemka, Amit Agrawal and Samit Mathur (now retired) had informed the government that they did not have any objection in sharing the property details.
